No Judgment
by digby
Here’s an excellent story in the St Petersburg Times about tasers. People are beginning to notice that the police are using these things willy nilly — and it’s killing people.
As I’ve said before, if a prescription drug were shown to have killed this many people the government would have withdrawn it from the market and class action lawsuits would be pending no matter how many people the drug had also helped. For some reason few people seem to think that all these deaths of innocent people by electrocution at the hands of police are cause for concern:
Late one night in October, a 17-year-old on a bike was chased by a police officer in a cruiser. When the boy refused to stop, the officer aimed his Taser out the driver’s window and fired. The boy fell off the bike and the cruiser ran over him, killing him.
Victor Steen was the fourth person who died in Florida in 2009 in an incident in which a Taser was used. It was the 57th such death since 2001, according to statistics compiled by Amnesty International and the St. Petersburg Times. At the time this placed Florida first in the nation as the state with the most fatalities related to Tasers, a weapon that delivers an incapacitating electrical jolt.
Number 54 was a mentally ill man in Fort Lauderdale who was hit with a Taser in April as he wandered in traffic, refusing to go with police. He had a heart attack and died at a hospital.
Number 55 occurred in Bradenton one week before Victor’s death. Police tried to stop him because he didn’t have a light on his bicycle. When he ran, police hit him with a Taser. He died within 35 minutes. The autopsy showed heart disease and a small amount of cocaine in his system.
Four days later, police in Panama City fired a Taser “at least twice” at a man who tried to conceal cocaine by swallowing it. He went into cardiac arrest and died.
Taser International, the maker of the weapon, denies that these deaths were caused by its product. Yet, these four unconnected cases illustrate a worrisome trend in Taser use.
There is no question that Tasers frequently save lives by offering law enforcement officers a nonlethal means of stopping people who present a threat to the officers, the public or themselves. But as the four fatal cases from 2009 show, Tasers are also being used to subdue people who appear to pose no threat.
Read on for the details.
This is truly a terrible problem. Thousands of people are dying now. It’s giving police officers a distorted sense of power and they are losing their good judgment. (Tasering a kid on a moving bike in traffic? What was he thinking?) And despite what Taser International says, people who knowing or unknowingly have heart conditions shouldn’t have to die because they don’t instantly comply with an police officer’s order. The mentally ill or those having an epileptic fit shouldn’t have to die because they can’t process those orders or physically comply with them. It’s a downright Orwellian excuse that because tasers often kill people who are sick or on drugs, they aren’t responsible for the deaths.
And that doesn’t even get into the civil liberties implications of this weapon which are horrific — shooting electricity into citizens to gain compliance used to be known as torture, but now is considered a law enforcement “tool” so benign that nobody blinks an eye when it’s used haphazardly against people who just happen to look at a cop sideways (which happens frequently.)The idea that in a free society the police are allowed to shoot people full of electricity for any reason is beyond bizarre.
Hopefully the press waking up to this at long last will create a groundswell for some changes although I don’t honestly know if it will. I first woke up to the horror of this weapon by reading an expose in the Miami Herald years ago.
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